Moving Forward

Analysis and outcome – worth doing

What do the Navy SEALs and the animation company Pixar have in common? According to Daniel Coyle in his book, “The Culture Code,” they have one very important thing. They analyze their performance in order to create future success.

The Navy SEALs regularly conduct what they call an After-Action Review, or AAR, after their missions. Team members face some important tough questions like “Where did we fail? Why did each of us do what we did?”

These conferences can be gruelling and are definitely not easy for a high caliber soldier to go through, especially after a successful mission. Even after a victory though, someone made a mistake somewhere, and in order to increase efficiency, these reviews, although they can become intense, are considered to be the most crucial thing the team does together aside from the missions themselves.

The directors at Pixar have their uncomfortable moments also during what they call BrainTrust meetings. The BrainTrust happens about a half dozen times during the making of a film at regular intervals. During these meetings, the film’s director presents the team’s current work to a group of veteran directors and producers who offer their honest opinions about what they consider to be the production’s flaws. Notes about where characters lack heart, where the storylines are confusing, and where jokes fall flat are all discussed. Just like the SEALs value the AAR, Pixar also considers a BrainTrust to be one of the most important things that can be done in order to ensure a film’s success.

So, what does that have to do with us in daily life? Well, plenty if you want to find success! Sometimes we need to take a look at our past to help us make a better future for ourselves.

If you’ve ever made the decision to lose some weight, you know what it’s like to look at the scale from one week to the next and see no change. If you’ve ever tried to increase your strength or endurance, you know what it’s like when you feel you’ve hit your peak. The truth is, it may not be that you’re failing in every area of your mission. You might just have to make some small changes in vital areas in order to accomplish your goals.

We’ve had more than a few students at Okami Kai Martial Arts and Fitness who have expressed how they made some tiny alteration in their diets or training programs that made all the difference as to how they started seeing positive results. Maybe it was cutting out that one dessert every night or swapping one regular food item for another in their daily diet. It could have been going to one type of class which was a little more challenging than going to another. Maybe it was adding one more class into their training routine.

The truth is, though, they wouldn’t have realized this if it wasn’t for them taking a look back at their current lifestyle and trying to see where they were making mistakes. It may not be as painful as an AAR or a BrainTrust, considering that most of these students did it by themselves and didn’t have to stand in front of a team of experts all telling them where they were messing up. There still might have been some uncomfortable moments when they realized they had to make a schedule change in order to accommodate a workout, or maybe had to say no to that food or drink they’re indulging in too often, though.

Everyone makes mistakes and even when the final outcome in an area or time period might be a success, there’s always some point where we can analyze our performance and know we could have done better somehow.

Want to see better or quicker results? You may want to conduct an After-Action Review on yourself. Maybe with a little bit of analysis like a BrainTrust, you can Move Forward and become a better production than you already are.